3. Make feedback helpful and meaningful. Students crave feedback on their writing, yet it doesn't always have the intended effect. If you write comments on students' papers, make sure they understand the vocabulary or symbols you. Take time to discuss them in class. Be cautious about the tone of your comments. The margins of a paper are small and can force you into short comments. When writing short comments, we tend to leave out the words that soften our message. While you may think, I'm not sure I understand. your point here," the limited space may cause you to write simply, "UNCLEAR" or just "?". Students can see comments such as these as unkind and unhelpful. Feedback need not always be written in the margins. You can experiment with different forms: individ ual conferences, taped responses, typed summary responses, and so forth. Finally, feedback should not entail "correcting" a student's writing In order to foster independent writers, you can provide summary comments that instruct students to look for problems and correct them on their own. So instead of adding an -s to the end of every first person present tense verb, a comment at the end might say, "There are several verbs that are missing an -s at the end. Try to locate and correct these verbs in the next version of this paper